


In Lightless Vaults

by icarus_chained



Series: Weregild 'verse [19]
Category: Norse Mythology, Supernatural
Genre: Freedom, Gen, Loneliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-28
Updated: 2012-04-28
Packaged: 2017-11-04 11:49:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/393512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icarus_chained/pseuds/icarus_chained
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A random extra to the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/18440">Weregild</a> series. </p>
<p>Jormungandr, loneliness and freedom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Lightless Vaults

Despite what many might think, Jor's world is not quiet. He does not hear as other beings hear, true, but even if he did, it is not silent in the depths of the sea. It is not quiet, not even in the lightless vaults so far beneath the sun that nothing there even remembers its name, save him. In the darkness and the gloom, there is yet noise, and he is part of it.

There is the hollow speaking of the Earth itself, the cracks and groans and hollow rumbles as it moves itself beneath him, flares hot beneath his coils, crunches and shatters itself beneath his passage, the thunder of his passing only a counterpoint to those vast, internal rumblings. The speaking of the Earth, deadened and swallowed by the dreaming ocean, but yet audible. Yet there.

There are the songs, somewhere far above him, the echoing, mournful cries of the creatures of the lighter waters, echoing down to the abyssal plains where he marks his slow, eternal passage, the calls of things tiny and great, magnificent and terrible, but none so great, none so terrible as he. As he passes his slow and silent way beneath them, a serpent coiled below their realm, vast in the darkness they will never penetrate, he listens to their thin, hollow singing.

There are other lives too. Deeper lives. Creatures who pass beneath the world a hair's breadth from his coils, who chatter and gibber in the darkness around his form, or ghost softly glowing before his eyes. Their lights the only lights in his world for the longest time, as he passed beneath the dreaming seas. There are lives in gloom that shrouds him, even here, even so deep, and their noises pass his way, near drowned in the booming of his passing, but still, but still. There, nonetheless.

No. His world is not silent, though ever it has been thought so. Jormungandr moves through a world of hollow roaring, of echoing songs, of life crying in the darkness. He moves in a world that is not dead, for all it lies so far from the warming touch of the sun. It is not quiet. It is not still.

But it is, it always was, desperately, _indescribably_ , lonely. It is hollow, though not empty. For all that there is life, for all that there creeps and drifts around him some measure of what he had left behind, been forced from, so long ago, still there is no-one to touch his passing. No-one to reach across to him, no-one to speak, no-one to sing a song for him alone, and remind him that he yet lives. In the hollow thundering of the oceans, there is no voice that speaks for him, and for long, aching years, loneliness had feathered a chill across his heart colder than even the lightless depths around him.

For long years, he had been lonely. For long years, he had been alone, his only breaches into that surface, sunlit world compelled by violence, and the playing of hurtful gods. For time without meaning, he had been alone.

One day, perhaps, he will tell Gabriel what it had meant, that the archangel had freed Jor's father, his brother. One day, he will tell Gabriel what it felt like, to have the hollow echoes of his world torn open, and family poured into the breach. To be called to the surface by his father's cry, not the biting hooks of gods. To be guided to his sister's realm, to share with the denizens there another form, and be granted freedom thus. To have looked upon Gabriel, an archangel, a being of light and fire and thunder, and seen only a being that would stand willingly between Jormungandr and those who would cast him into darkness once again.

One day, he will tell Gabriel what it had meant to be offered something that once Jor had thought only blood and the fires of Ragnarok would grant him. One day, he will tell Gabriel what it is like to live in a world that is not silent, but never speaks your name, and what it is like to be freed of that. One day, he will tell him.

For now, he simply cries upwards to the surface, breaches the vaults to arch into that sunlit world, and touches a voice that laughingly calls his name. A being of light and fire that holds his father's hand, and calls Jormungandr back into the world.

For now, he simply touches, and is glad.


End file.
